E-E-A-T

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. It is the framework Google uses to assess the quality of content and of the party behind it, described in Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines. The extra E for Experience arrived in 2022, because firsthand experience with a subject is often worth more than theoretical knowledge of it.

• Experience: has the author actually done the thing the text describes? A review from someone who used the product beats a rewrite of the spec sheet.
• Expertise: documented depth in whoever writes, through education, position or years of practice.
• Authoritativeness: recognition from outside in the form of backlinks, brand mentions and coverage showing that others treat you as a source.
• Trustworthiness: by Google's own account the most important of the four: accurate content, a transparent sender and a technically secure website.

E-E-A-T is not a ranking factor with a score. It is the quality concept Google's human raters judge search results against, and the one the algorithms try to reflect through measurable signals. You feel it in your SEO all the same: sites with named authors, documentation and external recognition come through Google's quality updates consistently better. The bar sits highest for YMYL subjects such as health, finance and law.

AI surfaces sharpen the same logic, since assistants pick their sources by authority and trust. The guide to E-E-A-T turns the four letters into something a site can document.